American Indian Culture and Research Journal

INTRODUCTION In American history and myth, Plains Indian society tends to be portrayed by the primary (and often solitary) figure of the male warrior. Images of the lives of Indian women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as earlier, come largely from western texts: the writings of travelers, missionaries, military officers, ethnographers and historians. For many reasons, however, these characterizations are likely to be unrevealing. Specifically, early male writers tended to focus on male activities, eliciting detailed information from male informants. When women do appear at all in descriptions of pre-reservation life, they often blend with the setting in a backdrop of endless menial chores. A characterization of women in “texts” produced by Plains Indians themselves might present a different picture. Such records do exist. In the nineteenth century and earlier, Plains Indian men kept pictographic biographies, as well as yearly records known as winter counts; oral narratives are thought to have complemented these pictographic documents. Although women did not produce the records, they do appear in them. What distinguishes picture writing from just a group of pictures is that the pictographs convey elements of a narrative that can then be expressed verbally. The term picture writing refers specifically to historical and religious documents. In the nineteenth century, Garrick Mallery reported that pictography was put to “practical use by historic Indians for important purposes, as important to them as the act of writing.” In context and use, the interplay of the pictographic record and the associated oral narratives would echo each other, creating an increasingly richer body of knowledge, uniting the people in a common past identity.

INTRODUCTION The attainment of tribal economic self-sufficiency depends in part upon a tribe’s ability to develop reservation lands and natural resources in a manner that meets long-term tribal objectives and maximizes tribal benefit. For successful tribal development, the tribe should carefully assess the strengths of its organizational capacities, as well as its inherent weaknesses. Successful tribal development requires a tribe to decide how much risk it is willing to assume in undertaking economic development. This decision takes into consideration the assets it has available to invest in its own development, the equity position it desires to retain in the development, and its expectations for a fair return on its investment. The Swinomish Indian tribal community of Washington state employed a strategic approach to assess its inherent strengths and weaknesses as a starting point for determining the most advantageous approach for undertaking a large-scale pleasure boat marina and mixed-use commercial real estate development on its reservation. This article examines the approach followed by the tribe as it sought to advance its economic development by leveraging its assets along with private investments. ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT AND TRIBAL POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS Tribal economic development is a principal strategy that many tribes use to improve their financial independence, reduce their dependency on external forms of assistance, and alleviate chronically depressed economic and social conditions that persist in many Indian reservations.

Slowly the language has crept into my writing, replacing a word here, a concept there, beginning to carry weight. The constant murmur of the pines, her beloved music, now became comprehensible to her in the same way that flows of Ojibwe language first began to make sense—a word here, a word there, a few connections, then the shape of ideas. It’s amazing that we even have Ojibwe speakers in this century. I get very troubled when I talk about the language. I really do have such regard for it. It’s a very deep, earthy, descriptive, gnarled language. It’s a great language. It’s not simple. It’s intellectually complex, and it’s so far beyond what I could ever hope to achieve in understanding. It’s so tied to the landscape. My love for the language far exceeds my ability to speak it. I just keep trying. In Love Medicine, Lulu Nanapush, who spent her formative years at a boarding school speaking only English, tells about the time Moses Pillager talked to Nanapush: “One summer long ago, when I was a little girl, he came to Nanapush and the two sat beneath the arbor, talking only in the old language.” Much later, as a young woman, Lulu visits Moses on his cat-ridden island and sleeps with him. She wakes up beside Moses to discover that he is talking in a language that she scarcely recognizes: “I woke to find him speaking in the old language, using words that few remember, forgotten, lost to people who live in town or dress in clothes” (LM 81).

“He did not know whether he was alive, because it sounded so loud when it spoke. It started playing with him, circling about him, doing all kinds of things, fooling with him.” This is how the Nuu-chah-nulth (formerly Nootka or Westcoast) tale of the Origin of the Wolf Ritual began, with the touchstone of the meeting of the worlds: the natural touched by the supernatural, the hero engaging the spirit world. The legend was reenacted throughout Nuu-chah-nulth territory as a means of celebrating this primal spiritual encounter of the tribal hero; and also as a means of conserving the powers and insights gained for the larger social grouping—the wisdom earned through religious quest and discipline. For Robin Ridington, the experience of visionary transformation is fundamental to Native American spirituality. Although it is ultimately personal and begun in isolation, the quest for it is fundamentally conversational and social. Power comes from a person’s conversation with the supernatural. It comes from an encounter with sentient beings with whom humans share the breath of life. The Wolf Ritual, or Tlukwana, with its associated regalia of masks, dances, costumes, and musical instruments, was a major feature of the Nuu-chah-nulth Winter Ceremonies. In common with other Northwest Coast Native nations, the lives of the Nuu-chah-nulth people were controlled by the seasons, and following a summer and autumn of gathering and preserving the abundant coastal food resources, the settled sacred time of winter began. It was in the winter that Nuu-chah-nulth ceremonial life proceeded. All aspects of life underwent a kind of saturnalian reversal: the tribe moved to its winter village quarters; summer “songs, normal personal names, usual words about wolves, gum chewing, hat wearing, basketry, and mat weaving were prohibited”; and frivolity, joy, and feasting in the ritual life of ceremony were everyone’s tasks for the season.